Work
A few stories, told the way I'd tell them over coffee: what was going on, what I did, and what changed. Where a client isn't named, it's because the work was confidential.
Moving a team without stopping the platform
Clausematch · CTO · 2022
- What was going on
- A RegTech scale-up serving banks and insurers needed to relocate its 25-person engineering team quickly, in 2022.
- What I did
- I planned the move with the founders, relocated the team to Lisbon and London as three squads, and kept the releases, the support rota and the security controls running throughout.
- What changed
- The team was rebuilt and delivering without a break in service, the platform kept its ISO 27001 certification, and cloud hosting costs later came down by 75%. Clausematch was acquired by Corlytics in 2023.
Making AI useful, safely
Zapmap · CTO · 2026
- What was going on
- The engineering team was using almost no AI, and the policy allowed only one approved tool.
- What I did
- I wrote the business case and the governance, and it became the first proposal approved by a new investment committee I helped design. I rolled out AI coding tools to 25 engineers and created an AI product engineer role.
- What changed
- AI moved from a policy question to part of daily work, with guardrails the business agreed. The same investment committee, an operate-and-change split and an architecture review board were running across three business lines by July 2026.
Due diligence before a major acquisition
Digital Advisory · Consulting CTO
- What was going on
- A buyer needed to know what it was really acquiring: the systems, the risks and the cost to integrate.
- What I did
- I led the technology due diligence and wrote the integration roadmap.
- What changed
- About 10% cost savings identified in the integration plan, and a board that went into the deal knowing the technology risks.
Change from the middle
Commonwealth Bank of Australia · 2000s
- What was going on
- A new group CIO had brought the bank's separate technology divisions, around 5,000 people, together and wanted them working as one, and closer to the business. The usual culture-change efforts weren't landing.
- What I did
- He asked me to run a 12-month programme on what we do and how we do it, with a budget of more than A$1m. We brought in strong outside help, including a course run by MIT Sloan. When the programme stalled at one layer of management, I stopped pushing on that layer and ran it with the people who reported to them.
- What changed
- Their teams pulled the change through, and the managers who had blocked it became its strongest advocates. We rebuilt how projects, software delivery, governance and investment decisions worked, benchmarked against industry standards, and the technology organisation became consistently high performing. The programme then spread to other parts of the bank.